Posted
by
timothyon Thursday July 02, 2009 @03:03PM
from the that's-a-disappointment dept.

snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."

Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.

Sometimes you put something into a standard as a way of pressuring people to adopt something. Make it the standard, and if Apple won't adopt it, make a big stink about how Safari isn't really HTML5 compliant.

I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.

The problem is not that apple won't adopt it, it's that apple *can't* adopt it, and nor can nokia, and nor can sony erricson, and nor can RIM, and nor can any of the other smart phone makers. There is *no* hardware support for decoding Ogg Theora, that makes it totally unsuitable for the task at hand. Even ignoring the submarine patent risk and the fact that it's far worse quality than h.264.

I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.

The W3C is irrelevant. The WHATWG didn't start out as part of the W3C, and if the W3C tried to push it around it could just break off again. The contents of the HTML 5 spec are determined solely by Ian Hickson, currently employed by Google. His only oversight is a steering committee. I can't find who's on the steering committee, but I'm very certain that it includes no one from Microsoft or Adobe, and Mozilla plus Opera almost certainly have more votes than Apple.

The stated reason is that, if vendors will refuse to implement a portion of the spec, that part shouldn't be in the spec. The spec isn't supposed to force vendors to implement something, it's supposed to be a common set of rules that everyone can follow, and mandating Theora is counter to that goal.

The stated reason is that, if vendors will refuse to implement a portion of the spec, that part shouldn't be in the spec. The spec isn't supposed to force vendors to implement something, it's supposed to be a common set of rules that everyone can follow, and mandating Theora is counter to that goal.

Sure, but there needs to be a way to distinguish between:

A) refusing to implement because there are sound engineering reasons not to do so

B) refusing to implement because doing so would make it harder for a company to lock people into proprietary formats

No standards body worthy of the slightest respect should ever concern itself with that second category.

I am not fond of putting it this way, but I think what really needs to happen is for the average user to grow a pair and realize why Item B is not in their interests and never will be. So long as the masses of users have no understanding of these things, it is always going to be an uphill battle to maintain an Internet that is as free and open as possible.

MPEG LA and all this RAND crap is killing this conversation by muddying the waters. That something is a standard does not imply that a license is usable by libre software. I suspect that this is not a problem for you, but it is for many of us.

If h.264 were to become the standard for the video tag, it could very well sink Mozilla and an open Webkit (Apple is really pooing where it eats on that one). "Reasonable" is such a subjective term... The cost wouldn't be reasonabl

If no browser will support the codecs then webmasters wont use html 5 and stick with html4. When IE owned a significant marketshare a couple of years ago the web evolution slowed down to a halt. Firefox can't adopt H.264 because its patented and Firefox can be shutdown if a lawsuit over infringement takes place.

And Firefox does not have a significant enough marketshare for developers to care about Ogg Vorbis/Theora. Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever b

Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used

Which professional tools are these? Most video editing software I've seen uses either QuickTime or Windows Media for exporting, and both of these have (free) plugins for encoding Theora (and Dirac). You wouldn't want to use Theora as an intermediate format - something like MJPEG or Pixlet with no inter-frame compression is better for that - but exporting from most tools is pretty trivial.

Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever be used because professional tools do not support. Its a catch-22 just like Microsoft Windows and Office. You can't ever leave the platform.

Like Microsoft said they wouldn't support ODT, throwing their weight behind OOXML instead?

Transcoding to any format shouldn't be a problem these days, ESPECIALLY one with an open spec, so there is no reason for a tool not to support Ogg.

In most cases, the purpose of a standards organization is not to be the supreme commander and dictate what everyone has to do, it's purpose is to be the consensus builder and find a compromise that everyone can agree on.......at least agree on enough to implement it. The web browser writers hold the most power in this case because if the standard doesn't get implemented by the majority of web browsers, then it is irrelevant. W3C has to keep this in mind at all times, otherwise they will fail at what they

I agree. Mozilla have supported Ogg Vorbis and Theora as of 3.5 and it works pretty good from the demos I have used. The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec. If hardware acceleration is a problem then work with companies to get it supported in hardware. I know it won't be easy but saying "ugh that is gonna be too hard, lets just drop it from the spec" is stupid, work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg. I am not a specialist so I have no idea how hard it would be to get h/w support for Ogg up and running but I know that my iRiver H10 mp3 player had Ogg support back in 2003 or so, so I am sure it is possible without _too_ much work.

> The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec

As much as I'd like Ogg Theora support all around, doing what you propose just leads to a useless spec (useless because implementors don't actually follow it, so you can't rely on using it).

> work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg.

The issue is hardware support in the form of ASICs for decoding theora; none of the companies you mentioned are relevant to that. The hardware issue is on cell phones and the like, not desktops, in case you missed that.

The problem might be worked around somewhat by using DSPs and software decoding optimized for those DSPs, but that's not quite clear.

You seem to be somewhat confused about what Ogg is. It's just a container format. For a real life analogy, think shipping containers. They come in a small number of shapes and sizes, but each one can contain anything from lots of barbie dolls to lots of sewing needles to a single chunk of industrial machinery. Just because you have someone (say a toy store) who knows how to open a container and then sell the barbie dolls they find therein doesn't mean that person will be able to to open that same container and then make effective use of the industrial machinery or sewing needles inside. The situation with container formats and codecs is quite similar.

No, because it is the only free and legal option open to all users and manufacturers.

It may be free, but nobody really knows if it's legal yet, due to the issue of submarine patents.

Theora should be specified.

Why? Because you like it? The HTML spec is not a platform of Open Source evangelism.

They can then add H264 or whatever as well if they wish, but for those who cannot use H264, Theora is a fallback available so that they can meet the standard.

But that means that everybody has to host Theora alongside their higher-quality videos. For content providers, that's not a very attractive option. We'd rather use the standard that is widely adopted in the real world, and only have one file to upload.

What good is a standard if you automatically prevent certain manufacturers from meeting it ?

That's an issue with any standard in the world. There's always going to be some

No, if something being royalty-free were a downside they would not have included a BSD userspace with OS X. While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations. As I recall back when Vorbis was getting off the ground, the implication was made that people with patents wouldn't care unless it got off the ground and then they would start looking for violations.

Basically, Theora and Vorbis are huge unknowns with potential patent bombs in them, regardless of what the developers and/. thinks. And all it takes is someone with a patent and the muster to enforce it and everyone who implemented them in their browser suddenly has a huge problem.

> While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations.

The exact same argument can be made for the BSD base Apple uses for OSX. It doesn't matter that BSD went through a long copyright case way back when; both because that case was about copyrights rather than patents, and because unknown patent violations can easily have crept into the code base since then. In fact, I can safely go out on a limb and guarantee that every non-trivial piece of software (including everything Apple has) is violating software patents. Software patents are handed out by the USPTO like Bibles are handed out in prison.

Apple's argument that they won't use Theora because of potential patent problems rings completely hollow. I'm not going to speculate on their motives, but the one they gave is nonsense.

Theora is a bit different from Ogg in this respect. Theora is based on VP3, which was both patented and commercially distributed for a number of years. If VP3 had been infringing someone else's patents, then they would likely have sued back when a company was making money from it. The patents that were required to VP3 were released by On2 under a free, irrevocable, license and then (I believe) allowed to lapse.

Dirac is in a weaker position; it is believed to be patent free, but no one has done a patent search to make sure and it is not based on an existing codec.

Absolutely - the notion of "submarine patents" rising up, should Theora take off, is not a new idea, and not specific to Apple. By mandating Theora in HTML5, you'd be risking the years of negotiations on the spec on the bet that there are no such patents - a bet I'd be surprised if any good Slashdot reader would take.

As others have pointed out, HTML has never mandated a specific image format reference in an IMG tag; a type of plugin referenced in OBJECT or EMBED; or the type of resource referenced in an A tag; it's outside it's scope. Let the standard focus on its scope, and let the market hash out the rest - it's not the end of the world to not have a single, mandated codec - in fact, I'd argue that having such a thing would unnecessarily limit our options - Theora is, to be kind, not the most efficient codec on the market; and the situation will likely only get worse. Don't hamstring HTML5 by hitching it to any particular codec.

Exactly. I hear 'royalty free' and I think of GIF, which was also royalty free... Until it wasn't. Which was an absolutely huge mess.

Honestly, if I were Apple and the Theora foundation offered a $100-per-million-device license saying basically 'we swear we are the sole authority on Ogg Theora, and you have a license from us to implement it to the spec' I'd be much happier than without it. Because then I'd have a set contract, spelling out the cost, and that if someone then comes along and says 'wait, we own this part of the spec, and you owe us $Xbillion' I could turn around to the Theora foundation and say 'Your breach of contract just cost me $Xbillion, and I expect you to pay that.' Basically, at that point the risk is Theora's, and not Apple's.

Apple is unwilling to take the risk that there are IP problems with the spec. It would take a lot of costly research and examinations for them to prove there aren't any, and there is no real benefit to them to spend the money and time. Translation: At free, it costs to much.

Microsoft really isn't "pushing" Windows Media that much anymore. Zune and Xbox already support MPEG-4 and H.264, as will Silverlight 3 and Windows 7.

Well they're not pushing it too hard anymore, but that's really because they already lost on the audio side. Their hopes for locking up online music sales died when the major labels agreed to sell without DRM. Video may not be all that far behind.

Anyway, the point was never to have high licensing costs, but to build relationships with media companies while strengthening their vendor lock-in.

So not counting Microsoft (which has had nothing to say on the matter, and therefore cannot be counted one way or another), the only party blocking this is Apple, and they're blocking it based solely on a trumped-up and prima facie invalid argument, and furthermore, an argument that has never once impeded any of Apple's past actions. In other words, "BAWWWWW they din pik my pet codec BAWWWWW i wants every1 usin only my codec BAWWWWW BAWWWWW BAWWWWW!"

Seriously, folks; QuickTime uses a plug-in architecture for a reason. If Apple were truly concerned about Theora and patents, all they'd need to do is implement it as a plug-in -something they should have absolutely no trouble doing, as it's their own architecture- which could then be trivially removed if the need ever arose. But no; this is a step back towards the bad old days of Not-Invented-Here syndrome at Apple.

Perhaps you're not aware that there are already Ogg+Theora etc plugins for QuickTime, and that anyone can install them for free.

Some of the reasons Apple has no interest in using FOSS codecs are:

- Codecs are bleeding edge technology, and FOSS is typically behind the curve (as Theora is)- Codec algorithms are patented to high heaven and impossibly difficult to vet for patent submarines.- Nobody sues FOSS until a monied company adopts it. Apple doesn't want to be the target.- There is already a technically su

Except it isn't just Apple blocking it. Nokia also sided against Ogg Theora, but then I guess that wouldn't be sensationalist enough for the/. crowd.Neither is h.264 Apple's codec. apart from patents apples only other contribution was to give the MPEG group the MOV container for use as the MP4 container file format.

In fact, phones (and mobile devices in general) are a major sore point for Theora - there are no hardware decoders for it. It's probably the only reason why Nokia is against, as there don't seem to be any other reasonable motives (unlike Apple).

How about making the browser use system (DirectShow on Windows, whatever-it's-called on Linux) codecs, so everybody could be using whatever codec they want. Look, a lot of media players on Windows (like WMP and MPC) use DirectShow, so thew users can install additional codecs.

Why they want to include the codecs in the browsers. This way is worse. If system codecs were used, then the sites could choose whether to use h.264, ogg or some other codec, like XviD.

Also, this way all of the patent/license/whatever issues for the browser vendors would go away. And if the users are watching video files on their computers they most likely have codecs already installed.

You're right on a technical level, you really are. But wouldn't that make playing video on the web more like it was in the web 1.0 era? People would have to stay on top of codecs and go surf for these sorts of things. I believe flash won out originally because it was a seamless solution for the end users-- one plugin to rule them all.

Honestly, the solution you're suggesting is not unlike the way Silverlight/Moonlight handles media-- except that it does have a default/preferred codec.

Why, you could circumvent the lack of a video tag on IE (or anything else) by using the pluggable codec support in Silverlight 3 to provide a Theora codec.;) And that won't require any proprietary tools and very little code- just (if the browser is IE, load the following silverlight control, point it to the codec and your theora video)

We might as well just keep using the object tag to embed media files and let the system figure out what's supposed to run it, if we're going to use system codecs. On Windows, WMP will do it, on Linux, mplayer (or gstreamer if the user is a sadomasochist), and on mac it will be Quicktime. I mean, it's progressive, in an absolutely regressive sort of way.

Apple won't support a codec that's incompatible with its huge installed base of ipods and iphones. They don't care about royalty fees because most Safari users pay for an OS X licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.

Microsoft won't support a codec that makes the web more reliable for non-Windows users - especially Linux users. They don't care about royalty fees because all IE users pay for a WIndows licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.

Google, Opera and Mozilla won't support anything that puts them at risk of needing to pay royalties on the huge number of free downloads they give away.

Nobody actually cares about end users or developers. If you think they do, you're kidding yourself.

True, most of them probably don't care much about users. However, the stance of Apple and Microsoft in your post clearly is clearly negative for developers and users because it locks everybody into paying them. Google, Opera, and Mozilla, while they don't necessarily actively HELP users, they're not actively hurting them either.

I'm not normally the 'rah rah open source' type, but the way you present that, one of the choices is clearly better.

> Google, Opera and Mozilla won't support anything that puts them at risk of needing to pay> royalties on the huge number of free downloads they give away.

That statement is hard to reconcile with the fact that Google is shipping H.264 support in chrome.

That discrepancy is easy to account for by noting that the MPEG-LA licensing terms for H.264 (see http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf [mpegla.com] ) have a cap on royalty payments. Looking at the rates there, anything over 10 million shipping units is ef

You can still make use of the tag in a cross platform way. Video For Everybody [camendesign.com] Is a simple set of code that uses the video tag with only two input files - an ogg and an mp4 - and lets the tag work for, well, everyone. IE6? Check. Safari? Check. iPhone? Yep.

It falls back to whatever method works for playback - including using Flash to play the h.264 if it needs to.

It's pretty funny to see so many people bitching about Apple not supporting ogg when Microsoft ignores the tag altogether. Everyone, start supporting the video tag today as widespread use is the only way to get big companies to fully adopt it - perhaps that will motivate Apple to someday support ogg.

Valid XML, all the time. Require that the tags balance, as in XHTML. This will make the document tree well-defined, which, at the moment, it is not. So all software that works on the DOM will behave consistently.

Errors put the browser in "dumb rendering" mode. Rather than a "best effort" approach, browsers should, upon detecting a serious error in the input, drop to "dumb mode" - default font, default colors, etc., after displaying an error message. Much of the incompatibility between browsers comes from inconsistent handling of bad HTML. So there should be a penalty, but not a fatal one, for bad code.

No more upper code pages. The only valid character sets should be Unicode, or ASCII with HTML escapes. Chars above 127 in ASCII mode are to be rendered as a black dot or square. No more "Latin-1", or the pre-Unicode encodings of Han or Korean. So all pages will render in all browsers, provided only that they have some full Unicode font.

Downloadable fonts. Netscape used to have downloadable fonts. The font makers bitched. Bring that feature back, despite the whining. No more having to express fonts as images.

WebForms. Get the WebForms proposal back on track. Any needed processing for input should be do-able without Javascript.

2D layout The "div"/"clear" model of layout was a flop. Horrors of Javascript are needed just to make columns balance. Absolute positioning is overused as a workaround for the limits of "div"/"clear". (Text on top of text happens all too often.) Tables were actually a better layout tool, because they're a 2D system. HTML needs a 2D layout model that can't accidentally result in overlaps. There are plenty of those around; most window managers have one. There's been a quiet move back to tables for layout, but people are embarrassed to admit it.

Better parallelism. Pages must do their initial render without "document.write()". Forcing sequentiality during initial page load should be considered an error. This will make pages load faster. Some ad code will have to be rewritten.

Valid XML, all the time. Require that the tags balance, as in XHTML. This will make the document tree well-defined, which, at the moment, it is not. So all software that works on the DOM will behave consistently.

You're wrong. The document tree is well-defined in HTML 5. You don't need XML, you just need to follow the HTML spec. Of course, we can't force people to follow the spec, and the Web is currently full of non-conforming pages that include half-assed attempts at using bits and pieces of XHTML mixed with HTML. XHTML doesn't make anything better.

Errors put the browser in "dumb rendering" mode. Rather than a "best effort" approach, browsers should, upon detecting a serious error in the input, drop to "dumb mode" - default font, default colors, etc., after displaying an error message. Much of the incompatibility between browsers comes from inconsistent handling of bad HTML. So there should be a penalty, but not a fatal one, for bad code.

You're wrong. If your browser does this, users will use some other browser (regardless of whether it conforms to the HTML5 spec or not, because users don't care about that). You're right that broken code is a problem, but HTML5 addresses this by more clearly defining how broken code should be handled, so that all browsers can try to render even bad code in a consistent and compatible way.

No more upper code pages. The only valid character sets should be Unicode, or ASCII with HTML escapes. Chars above 127 in ASCII mode are to be rendered as a black dot or square. No more "Latin-1", or the pre-Unicode encodings of Han or Korean. So all pages will render in all browsers, provided only that they have some full Unicode font.

You're wrong. If you make a browser that doesn't support these other character sets, users will choose something else (see above). Of course everybody should be using UTF-8 these days, but we can't force them to.

Downloadable fonts. Netscape used to have downloadable fonts. The font makers bitched. Bring that feature back, despite the whining. No more having to express fonts as images.

WebForms. Get the WebForms proposal back on track. Any needed processing for input should be do-able without Javascript.

HTML5 includes Web Forms 2.

2D layout The "div"/"clear" model of layout was a flop. Horrors of Javascript are needed just to make columns balance. Absolute positioning is overused as a workaround for the limits of "div"/"clear". (Text on top of text happens all too often.) Tables were actually a better layout tool, because they're a 2D system. HTML needs a 2D layout model that can't accidentally result in overlaps. There are plenty of those around; most window managers have one. There's been a quiet move back to tables for layout, but people are embarrassed to admit it.

CSS layout has some problems. Balanced columns is certainly one of them (although tables certainly doesn't fix that). They're working on it, but this can be addressed by improving CSS, outside of HTML.

Better parallelism. Pages must do their initial render without "document.write()". Forcing sequentiality during initial page load should be considered an error. This will make pages load faster. Some ad code will have to be rewritten.

I'm not sure what you're talking about exactly, but this sounds like a JavaScript implementation issue and not an HTML issue at all.

Audio video codecs are outside the scope of HTML. Whatever it says in the HTML 5 spec about video codecs, that will not magically change the last 20 years of digital audio video away from MPEG to something else.

The current audio video standard is ISO MPEG-4 (2001) and the codecs are H.264/AAC. Supporting this standard is not an academic issue because the world is full of content as well as hardware and software players and authoring tools that conform to this standard. It's also the video in Flash and in YouTube, which is considered the de facto standard in "Web video". When people talk about Web video they usually mean YouTube or something very like it. They are talking about MPEG-4.

The MPEG-4 content that you find in the world and on the Web today includes:

- every song ever offered for sale in or purchased from iTunes Store- every song ripped from a CD by iTunes since 2002- every video ever made on a cell phone (3GPP is part of MPEG-4) including the iPhone's recent shoot, edit, upload to YouTube feature which is H.264/AAC- every video on YouTube is stored as MPEG-4 (no matter what format you originally uploaded)- almost all of the video that runs in Adobe Flash, excluding 320x240 movies which may be the old codec- all of the consumer video shot on solid state storage, and most of it from a few years before that- all Podcast video is H.264 and most Podcast audio is AAC- Blu-Ray

Nobody has explained how all of this content would be transcoded to Ogg or other non-standard format in order to be published on the Web. Where would the computing time come from? How would it be practically done? What are you going to tell someone who wants to upload a video from their camera or phone directly to the Web? That they should transcode it into a non-standard audio video codec first?

The players are very important also, because they have H.264/AAC decoding HARDWARE, which enables them to work efficiently enough to run on batteries. You can't drop a new software codec into these, you have to drop in a replacement audio video decoder chip. These include:

- every iPod and all of their competitors, except for the ones that only play MP3 which is part of MPEG-2- every PC with a recent NVIDIA GPU can decode H.264/AAC without breaking a sweat or busting its batteries because it happens in the GPU- Internet set-top boxes such as AppleTV and Netflix- PlayStation3 and other game boxes- even the Zune has MPEG-4 hardware in it, although somewhat underutilized from what I hear

Even software players cannot so easily be modified to support a non-standard codec, because of the scope of the MPEG-4 support. We're talking about every Mac and every PC in the world, because they all have one or both of these:

- every QuickTime/iTunes since 2002 is MPEG-4- every Adobe FlashPlayer version 9 or 10 is MPEG-4

The reason those 2 match both each other and all the hardware players is because of the benefits of standardization, which took place almost a decade ago for MPEG-4 and goes back further to previous MPEG versions. If you, or Mozilla, or anyone, wants to make an audio video player, they only need to conform to the MPEG-4 standard to enable their player to play all of the content from QuickTime/iTunes and Flash. You can come along in 2009 and decide to get your feet wet in audio video players and simply by following a published ISO specification you can have instant equality with QuickTime and Flash and others. Again, the benefit of standardization.

A very important consideration that is often completely ignored by Web-centric people as they talk about audio video is the authoring tools! People who make audio and video all day long also want to publish their work on the Web. MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, so there is not just 8 years of MPEG-4 authoring tools right now, there is almost 18 years of digital audio video practice realized in MPEG-4. A key feature here is that these tools must not make content that has a "content tax" on it, like

uh? Lots of companies are not stupid about proprietary crap being obsolete. They are moving away by the droves, and such publication is deliberately hidden from the media due to Microsoft essentially owning the media (you'd be surprised).

Once licensing is done for, for many products, you'll see lots of people switching. Examples of this software are things like Office 2K7. If there's a version released after that, everyone will swap to openoffice as they've already been planning/preparing at an enterprise l

Uh, OO certainly does compete with MS office not to mention it's basically compatible now (can convert from and to ODF/OOXML) I use OO for everything and nobody in our office realizes because guess what? Our enterprise even wanted to swap sans that they had already purchased and are using the 07 purchased licenses. That migration cost in a business is calculated and not worth it as that's hardly a true pressing issue. Formatting and other issues don't really exist anymore.

Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.

Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.

Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.

Untrue. Xiph has made heroic progress with Theora, but it's still a decade-old codec design and bitstream, and it's hard to imagine it catching up with xvid, let alone a good H.264 implementation.

YouTube certainly has quality issues, but things can be bad in more than one way at a time. There's nothing that less efficient codec would help them with. Note their top bitrate is 1280x720p30 at 2 Mbps.

Some samples compared Xiph's latest demo clips, with the same source encoded with VC-1 and x264 are here:

Well, it's not like YouTube sells more ads with better looking video, and I doubt 90% of the uploads get watched more than a dozen times. They probably have some pretty deep metrics about the watts/cents per minute of video encoding and tune for that.

YouTube is also really only a good example of YouTube, since they're a massively money-losing operation funded by a very rich company. No one else does it like YouTube, and ever other video site is going to average a lot higher views/clip, so they can afford

Nope. I don't know if anyone's even scoped a hardware implementation of VP3. There have been some VP6/7 DSP implementations, but no ASIC ones (ASIC have better power consumption).

Now, Theora is a pretty simple codec, so doing it in hardware would be a lot simpler than H.264 and probably simpler than VC-1. But it can take quite a few engineering years to refine a decoder for performant playback.

Of couree, performance isn't just the video decoder. It's the video and the audio decoder, and the whole pipeline t

Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.

The low bitrate, for whatever reason is keeping to the specs they've been using since launch, which are using the xvid implementation of old Sorenson Spark H.263 v1/MPEG-4 Part 2 Short Header. Maybe for device compatibility? Anyway, That's a codec about as old as the Theora bitstream, so we wouldn't expect it to be much better.

But I don't know that YouTube thinks it's "good enough" - they're offering higher quality modes, and that's what you get by default on the iPhone and other platforms. For whatever reason they're keeping around a legacy version, likely backwards comaptibility with some clients that don't do H.264 for whatever reason.

For the their high quality streams, Theora isn't competitive in quality. And for the highly compatible streams, Theora isn't competitive in compatibility.

So YouTube saying that Theora doesn't make sense for them makes sense to me. Therora doesn't an advantage in quality or compatibility for the streams they're doing.

Also, Big Buck Bunny isn't the best clip to extrapolate from, as it's really high quality lossless animation. To really see what YouTube needs to handle, try some lousy webcam, DV, and VOB rips. That's where H.264's in-loop deblocking filter give it a big advantage over other codecs, because it just gets smoother intead of blocky as the content gets more challenging.

Not to dismiss the excellent development work Xiph has done on Theora. The posts have been a fascinating read. But it's not plausible to me that anyone can make a business case for Theora over H.264, VC-1, or ASP licensing is available; the reduced bandwidth costs would be bigger than the actual real-world licensing fees for the real world examples I've thought of.

Theora's sweet spot would be in cases where MPEG-LA codec licenses simply aren't available for whatever reason. I imagine a fully refined Theora decoder would need fewer MIPS/pixel than H.264 High Profile, and perhaps even Baseline. But even in those cases, VC-1 Main Profile will probably offer similar performance with significantly better efficiency.

You sure do put a lot of energy into slagging Ogg, and you consistently neglect mention the advantage Ogg has over H.264: it is unencumbered by patents and therefore free for anybody to encode and/or play, on any hardware they wish.

Oh, I don't have anything against Theora per se, nor Ogg in general. It's just people keep having highly unrealistic hopes for what it can do in terms of compression efficiency and ecossytem.

Codecs are hard, and it does no one any benefit to assume they're capable of things they simply aren't.

The Xiph blog posts on their optimization process for Theora have been excellent reading, and they've done really good work. But the bitstream itself simply isn't capable of what modern codecs are capable of already. I

What are your mobile devices, and what's your media player? All the current ones that are meant for media playback include H.264 ASICs. And those are getting crazy good; the Zune HD's going to support 720p HD playback using the NVidia Tegra.

Lacking an ASIC, any Theora on devices would need to be done in sofware, and even a simple codec can be extremely taxing on a 400-600 MHz ARM. Even if it's playable it's going to eat battery like no tomorrow. I can imagine a really good implementation being able to mayb

Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?

I think this is a really good point. I mean, I have no idea if it's true or not... maybe they do specify image file formats, I have no f*****g idea. But it certainly makes sense. The standard should define how web developers specify images, and how browsers should handle them, but the actual file formats are left up to the market to work out. Same thing with video... makes sense, right?

There are really only two significant video formats today for web streaming: Mpeg4/H.264 with MP3 or AAC audio is technically superior; Ogg/Theora with Vorbis audio is freer. (Though I guarantee you'll see trolls coming out of the woodwork with all sorts of wacky patent claims if Theora ever becomes really big.)

So, Apple will support one; Mozilla will support the other; Microsoft will support none; and VLC will release a super-duper ninja plugin that runs in any browser and supports both, plus 1001 other obscure formats for good measure. People will look around and see who's suing whom and how successfully, and eventually one or two formats will become so common that a browser developer would have to be stupid not to accept it -- the video equivalent of JPEG and GIF.

I'd say Ogg is #5 at best today. #6 if you count torrents and hence MPEG-4 part 2.

As for Microsoft support, that's becoming pretty codec neutral. Silverlight 3 (currently in beta) supports both H.264 and has a Raw AV pipeline allowing arbitrary codecs in managed code to be added to any Silverlight player. So adding Theora/Vorbis or any other codec, format, and protocol can be done inside the Silverlight sandbox by any third party.

The problem with standards is that if you leave too much open to "interpretation" you get a mess of incompatibilities. I'm a firm believer that standards organizations need to make the truly important parts of the spec completely mandatory, i.e., if you don't support <video> and all the listed codecs, you can't claim HTML5 compatibility.

Precisely. That's why you say "if you don't do X, Y, and Z, you can't say you're compliant with the spec." Sun does this all the time to Java EE appserver vendors and what do you know? They all implement the specs fully (with the inevitable bugs of course).

I think you missed my point. Browser vendors aren't going to implement things they don't want to, regardless of what the spec says. That' the whole reason CSS2.1 exists. The vendors didn't implement a number of things in CSS2.0 and thus a revised spec was released to more closely match what was actually implemented.
This is the same. The W3C aren't going to release a spec that no one can/will implement fully. Ian Hickson has made that quite clear.

For some reason, any "official" YouTube videos (music videos from labels, trailers, etc.) are typically shitty quality. Someone else will upload a high quality version with good sound and no artifacting, but it'll get taken down.

To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.

No, it is not. There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google and does not work with YouTube (AFAICT). Subsequent requests for clarification failed to elicit any official statement. Peter Kasting of the Chrome team stated [whatwg.org]:

I don't believe Chris was speaking in any official capacity for YT or Google any more than I am. I think it is inappropriate to conflate his opinion of the matter with Google's. I have not seen _any_ official statement from Google regarding codec quality.

This is a quote from an actual Google employee, who incidentally happens to work on their browser and quite possibly knows their exact reasons for supporting both Theora and H.264.

Could people please stop spreading the misinformation that Google/YouTube believes that they can't use Theora because of its bitrate? It's completely unsubstantiated. Period.

I agree strongly with this. There was a long period where we could count on firefox, but not IE to render PNG files with transparency (boy, do I remember), or a large portion of the CSS spec. Didn't stop anyone from using transparent PNG files and standards-compliant CSS in their design if they wished, they just had to know that it wouldn't look good in IE (a show stopper for many). But IE e...v...e...n...t...u...a...l...l...y caught up.

I say implement the tag, give the web developers what they want. Let them host the video in multiple formats and just serve up the appropriate one based on the detected browser or the user's preference (as many sites already do anyways). Ideally history would repeat itself and all the dominant browsers will eventually be able to handle all the major formats used with the tag.

Maybe W3C saw that as a tragic omission and they didn't want to repeat the mistake. Remember in the 1990s when you'd use a PNG and then find out that some people couldn't see it? Shit, to this very day there are still people running browsers that can't show these images (or can't show them quite right, like MSIE6), and those browsers are far newer than PNG. If in 1998 W3C said, "This format has been around for several years and is well-proven

As was argued by the original author, you're left in a situation where if Ogg were specified in the standard, you'd have folks who followed the standard at a disadvantage in quality and/or bitrate.

The idea was not to restrict the supported codecs to Theora. The idea was to mandate at least Theora support. The way HTML5 video element is specified, you can provide several streams in various formats, letting browser pick the preferable one automatically. Mandatory Theora support would simply mean that everyone could provide one of the streams in it, and know that any browser can display it out of the box. Presumably, if e.g H.264 is also provided, all browsers that support it would just pick it, so ther

The mention of Apple managed to spleen together two unrelated ideas: "expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free."

There is no relationship between worrying about patent submarines and Ogg being royalty free. This is simple idiot-targeted editorializing. Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial. Its entire business plan is based on pushing users to do Google searches as that $50M in search fees is its only source of income.

The only good news is that Apple owns the mobile web with the iPhone, so it can pretty much establish HTML5 itself and provide Flash-killer standards-based video without any help from Firefox.

You do know that almost everyone without an iPhone can still access the web in much the sme ways as people with an iPhone.....right?? They use a web browser, of which there are many. One of the most popular being Opera Mini.

Apple are *not* a neutral 3rd party here. They stand to gain on licenses for H.264 that there competitors would be force to pay since they *have* patents on H.264... They are the patent troll here....They want everyone to think there is a risk. It makes them money.

>Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent>trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone.

The patent pools provide ZERO protection against patent trolls.

Several people got sued DESPITE paying for patent licenses to the MPEG patent pool. The MPEG LA provides no guarantee they cover all patents applying to their technologies.

FYI: Not only is Java Open Source, it is actually 'Free Software' and has been for a while now. The license of Java also always gave a grant for compatible implementations, even when it was not Free Software (hence GCJ/Classpath, Kaffe etc. were never under any threat). For this reason I usually recommend Java rather than other equivalent technologies (which I shall not name lest its proponents tarnish me as 'troll'). Yes, it is a shame in this day and age we cannot even standardise on video codecs due to competing business interests ("my business is more important than my users)".

The history of Apple proprietary hardware which they only recently (mostly) gave up?

The history of Apple suing clone makers out of existence?

The ongoing history of Apple locking iPhone users into their app store, dictating what apps are and are not acceptable, making exclusive agreements with a wireless carrier and enforcing said carrier's rules on what one can do with their connection even AFTER they have PAID FOR IT?

Hey.. I hate Microsoft but at least they don't care what CPU I run Windows on or what apps I run in Windows so long as I bought it per-seat!

And today we read about Apple playing their part in wrecking an effort to get an open standard for internet video. Looks like a continuation of history to me!

Microsoft has gained popularity through theft of technology(GUI From Apple, their defense was "We stole it from Xerox, not Apple), Backdoor licensing agreements (IBM PC-DOS/MS-Dos), and anti-trust in general (How many competitors has Microsoft bought out or used "creative innovations" that break the original software [java, Internet explorer/HTML Standardization], in order to remove competitors?). They continue to use shady business practices to force PC manufacturers into sell

On the other hand, Apple has been releasing proprietary, non-upgradeable hardware, forcing their users to pay a premium for the hardware, then forcing an upgrade to the customer, causing them to buy all new hardware, for most of the company's history since the Mac was invented. Apple's Proprietary business deals have stagnated their platform several times, but their "creative marketing' has always managed to create enough fanboys to turn almost every Mac user into a smug elitist bastard who points the flaws out in everyone else's product except their own. Microsoft has also been making progress in that marketing strategy, but has yet to achieve Apple's market share in holier-than-thou egotistical bastards.

Meanwhile, we Linux/Ubuntu smug elitist bastards continue to point out flaws in everyone else's production, including our own, constantly taking the defeatist attitude that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" despite the fact that, at this point, it's easier to install than all competitors' products and easier to admin, maintain and upgrade than all competitors' products,

It's not just easier, it takes far less time, too. Install Windows Vista with all the updates, drivers and service packs? 6-7 hours. Linux? Maybe 30 minutes with updates.
Ok, you might think I'm slow, but I try to be thorough.

Yes, yes, just like those transparent PNG files I've heard so much about. Or that new CSS 2 thing. Any browser that doesn't support them will just fall by the wayside the moment a superior browser comes out.

We have been taught to fear destruction, and praise creation, without realizing the two functions are complementary. Like a tree must be pruned before it can bear fruit, the death of outdated technologies forces us to innovate, and thus destroying creates. When flash and silverlight die, newer, better technologies will fill the void. I echo your call for said entities to die already. Death is beautiful.

Not "Just because". Fuck Real for producing crappy software that doesn't fit in anywhere at makes it annoyingly non-trivial to download things I want to watch.

Fuck Adobe for Flash. Seriously, I don't need vector graphics in my web browser. I'd love to have embedded.wmv/.avi/.mpeg files, whatever, because I can play those with mplayer which DOES NOT SUCK. As opposed to flash.

Fuck Microsoft for being the great browser market retardant. And in general for writing shitty software which doesn't do what I want it to (heck, I can't even get XP to install; epic fail).

And fuck Apple for being such control freaks. Well, first, fuck 'em for not helping fix this browser shit. Secondly, fuck them for being a worse control freak than Microsoft could ever be. I recently played with an iPhone (display/sales demo); among the top 25 apps in the store is one that displays scantily clad women, which are "as naked as Apple will let us get away with". FFS, Apple. Don't decide whether I'm going to watch porn on my phone. And you include a web browser---is that porn-filtered too? Assholes.

But don't fuck with Java. It's free software. It works for what it does: sorting algorithm animations and interactive Rubik's cube algorithm display. Java is OK, when used in moderation.

The summary is actually pretty terrible at explaining the reasoning. So I think I will:

Apple's reasoning:1. There is no hardware support for ogg theora, this means it can't be decoded on an iPhone.2. The patent situation with theora is not known, but it likely does trip over some, and to start using it and *then* have the licensing worked out is a sure way to end up paying a crap load for it.Nokia's reasoning:1. There is no hardware support for ogg theora, this means it can't be decoded on any of their pho

I know. Ctrl+s doesn't even save a file. Emacs is a great text editor, incremental search is cool and all, and I kinda understand why people rave about it, but come on people, without the ability to save the files you edit with it, it's just lacking the technology we've really come to expect in a modern editor.

Notepad, although its exuberant-ctags integration and psychoanalyst simulation features aren't quite there yet (Windows 8 wishlist???), saves and opens files like a champ. Open-source hackers could re

It's not just Apple, though. MS will probably not implement Theora either. Google will not be using it for anything substantial because of substandard quality per bit.
The fact is that nothing is gained by making it a spec requirement. Either vendors will implement Theora or they won't, having it in the spec won't change anything. So why even have it, if that's the case?